Growing up in a rural farm town, I’ve met a lot of people with a close minded view of the world. While the opinions of others were always there, I was too naive to fully grasp their impact until I had my first encounter with someone pushing their opinion onto me. At a STEM convention, this person told me that because I was a girl, I wasn't good at math or science and that I shouldn’t practice it. This event was the first of many situations where I would be looked down upon in the math and science world just because I was female. However, this is also when I learned to let these views drive me, not silence me. In eighth grade I took a wood shop class that not only taught me valuable lessons about building, but also about life. My friend and I had to build a tower out of toothpicks, and it ended up breaking the school’s record for being able to hold the most weight. Because of this accomplishment we were asked to take our creation to a STEM presentation to showcase our work. At one point a man stopped at our table and as I excitedly began to tell him about our project he stopped me and asked me where the people who actually made the tower were. When I told him that we were the people who made it, he laughed and called me a liar, saying we must have bought it off someone. According to him, girls should not be allowed to take a wood shop class because they would never be any good at it. These were the first words that fueled me to become more competitive and work even harder to prove close-minded people wrong. These were also the words that shaped the philosophy that I live my life by: “Always do the best work you can. Try to exceed not only the expectations of others, but push past the limitations you may have inadvertently set for yourself.”